Notre Shame
Credit to Author: BEN KRITZ, TMT| Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2019 16:19:32 +0000
NO act of kindness goes unpunished, and a recent example of the truth of that old saw is the simpering backlash recently directed at wealthy donors who have pledged hundreds of millions of euros for the reconstruction of the fire-damaged Notre Dame de Paris.
Although no one has yet been able to provide even a rough estimate of what it will cost to restore the 12th-century landmark, a total of at least a billion euros has been promised by several donors. The cost could very well exceed that; inspections of the ruined cathedral have revealed it did suffer significant structural damage even though it remained standing.
Within hours of the first pledges, however, angry posts on social media began appearing, all of which made the same basic complaint: If the world’s ultra-wealthy can readily pledge hundreds of millions to rebuild a mere church, why can’t they not do the same for the world’s downtrodden, such as famine victims in Yemen, homeless and unemployed people in France itself, persecuted Rohingya in Burma, or whatever other disadvantaged group the post’s author can identify. One widely shared version of the what-aboutism pointed out that the Roman Catholic Church, having “a net worth of $30 billion” (in reality, it is actually much higher than that), does not need anyone’s charity to be able to restore Notre Dame.
The sentiment is not completely without validity; no one with a soul would dare to suggest that people in need should not be helped by others with the capacity to do so. What makes the “social justice” argument wrong, however, is its posing social ills as a zero-sum game, on the one hand, and its shortsighted aspirations on the other, all built on the dubious axiom that wealth is inherently immoral.
Notre Dame is a world heritage site, as deemed by the UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization), and is therefore part of human culture in general. It must be preserved, and any lawful means applied to accomplish that are above reproach. The fact that there are other social ills in the world, or that other cultural monuments elsewhere have been lost or fallen into decay does not lessen Notre Dame’s legitimacy. To even put it at the center of an argument about economic inequality is a shameful non sequitur that cheapens the presumed concern for human welfare to mere envy.
Redistributing wealth, which is the thrust of the progressive argument, does not address the root causes of why wealth seems so unbalanced in the first place. Let’s consider two currently popular progressive ideas, the “wealth tax,” various forms of which have been proposed by Democratic presidential candidates in the US, and the “basic income,” which has gained popular traction in Europe.
The wealth tax is a punitive measure – some advocates are hesitant to characterize it as such, but others embrace it – against “having too much money,” and it can be levied in a couple of different ways, either through a progressive tax regime or a simple tax on wealth or income above a certain threshold. The idea is that it would redistribute wealth in two ways: Directly through tax revenues to the government, which would then presumably be used to fund social benefits, and indirectly through discouraging large personal incomes, which would then presumably encourage businesses to redistribute the extra revenue in the form of new jobs and higher wages to “ordinary” workers.
The fatal flaw in this notion is that it discourages growth on a personal level, and that in turn discourages business growth and innovation. If the message is one will be penalized for being too successful according to some arbitrary standard, the reaction is to be unsuccessful at all, at least not beyond the level necessary to meet one’s definition of subsistence.
Instead of penalizing excessive wealth, the solution to inequality is to assess the means by which great amounts of wealth are amassed. Wealth should only be acquired as a result of the creation or the exchange of value (This is the underlying philosophy of Islamic finance, coincidentally, however imperfect it may be in actual practice). A chief executive officer a large corporation is entitled to a multimillion-dollar salary if the company’s shareholders deem that is a fair exchange for the value his work adds to the business, for example. An investor who earns millions trading currency, or Bitcoin, or second- or third-hand securitized debt, on the other hand, is neither creating nor exchanging value.
If the problem of inequality is considered in those terms, notions like a “basic income,” where the government is expected to provide a certain amount of compensation to citizens for merely existing, or a “living wage,” where employers are obliged to pay an arbitrary amount to workers without reference to the actual value their work adds to the business, become completely untenable. Opportunities to acquire wealth without exerting any productive effort at higher levels of the economic pyramid are what made wealth inequality so lopsided in the first place; the solution to it cannot be to simply perpetrate the same flaw at lower levels.
Rationalizing incomes rather than merely imposing arbitrary limits on their scale, and removing barriers to opportunities to acquire and create wealth rather than settling for short-term, unsustainable work-arounds take much more effort than expressing envy, but they will work much better to solve the problem of economic inequality – and all without shaming anyone for wanting to give their money to rebuild an old church.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
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